Picnic in the Park is a bright and colorful kids board game that takes children on a fun-filled adventure through a park with lots of cute creatures. Kids will go on a quest to gather up food and drinks for their picnic baskets, and the first one to get to the picnic grounds with a full basket will win the game.

To start a game, you need to access the settings menu first, adding in the number of human players and the number of computer players. Kids can play this on their own against the iPad, but it’s best with other human friends.

Games can be played with up to four humans or three other iPad competitors when playing a single player game, so four children can play at once. You can also elect to have two kids and no computer players, or some variation of human players and computer players. Tapping on the names will allow you to enter each child’s name, and you can also choose a custom icon.

To play, each child will tap on the dice icon, which will display a number between one and six. That’s the number of spaces each child’s character will advance on the board, which happens automatically, making it ultra simple to play the game.

When someone lands on a food item, such as a watermelon, it will go into their basket. The basket has several different food slots, which must be filled for someone to win.

There are multiple checkpoints across the board, and if a player does not have enough items to get past that point, he or she must return to the beginning of the area. This mechanic made the game a bit repetitive, but younger kids probably won’t mind, and it does serve to increase the length of the game.

The game also has wild card spots on the board that may cause something disastrous to happen. For example, there’s a sneaky raccoon who loves to steal food, and ants who love sweets. These cards remove an item from the basket, which must be recollected.

Picnic in the Park, though cute, is a simple board game that doesn’t require any strategy to win. It’s essentially just a game where you roll the dice over and over and hope to get lucky, so it’s really only suitable for very young children.

What I liked: This app has colorful graphics which look great on the Retina iPad. Kids will love playing this just to look at all the bright colors and cute characters.

What I didn’t like: Creating a game is a bit unintuitive, requiring accessing the settings menu before you can begin. At times, the character banner at the top of the screen entirely blocks the board so that you can’t see what’s going on. This could stand to be improved, because kids might not know to navigate around the board to get a better view.

To buy or not to buy: This is a fun little board game to download for kids. It might not last more than a game or two, but it’s priced low enough that it’s worthwhile even if you only play a few times.

Nice review! The update to the game does include a new strategy option to make the game more interactive and appealing to those beyond preschool and kindergarten. It allows for a 5 “re-rolls” during the course of the game, whenever the player feels it would be advantageous. This is an option so very young players don’t have to use it if they would rather not.